This page introduces chapter 45 and is absent of number

Page  419    

" 'The House of Millions of years', was dedicated to Osiris,4  the 'Lord of Eternity', of whom it was said in the Pyramid texts:
                                            You have gone but you will return, you have slept, but you will awake,
                                             you have died, but you will live .  .  . Betake yourself to the waterway,
                                             fare upstream .  .  . travel about Abydos in this spirit-form of yours
                                             which the gods commanded to belong to you.  5
                                            

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" Anyhow, I must be stirring, and pretty fast too. " But he lay another moment, mus-ing and recalling, before he got up. " Then thank ye kindly, and  

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God be with ye, " the tears came to his eyes as he smiled. And with that he would have been off, but instead sat suddenly down again with his hat and stick in his hand, being forced to the realization that his knees would not support him. "Hullo," he thought, "this won't do. I am supposed to be back in the dining room punctually at eleven for the lecture. Taking walks up here is very beautiful - but appears to have its difficult side . Well, well, I can't stop here. I must have got stiff from lying; I shall be better as Imove about." He tried again to get on his legs and , by dint of great effort, succeeded.
      But the return home was lamentable indeed, after the high spirits of his setting forth. He had repeatedly to rest by the way feeling the colour recede from his face, and the cold sweat break out on his brow; the wild breathing of his heart took away his breath. Thus painfully he fought his way down the winding path and reached the bottom in the neighbourhood of the Kurkhaus. But here it became clear that his own powers would never take him over the stretch between him and the Berghof; and accordingly, as there was no tram and he saw no carriages for hire, he hailed a driver going towards the Dorf with a load of empty boxes and asked permission to climb into his wagon. Back to back with the man, his legs hanging down out of the end, swaying and nodding with fatigue and the jolting of the vehicle, regarded with surprise and sympathy by the passers-by, he got as far as the railway crossing where he dismounted and paid for his ride, whether much money or little he did not heed, and hurried headlong up the drive.
     "Depechez-vouz, monsieur," said to him the French concierge. "La conference de M. Krokowski vient de commencer."
Hans Castorp tossed hat and stick on the stand and sqeezed himself with much precaution, tongue between his teeth, through
The partly open glass door into the dining room, where the society of the cure sat in rows on their chairs, and on the right hand side of the room, behind a covered table adorned with a water-bottle, Dr Krokowski, in a frock-coat, stood and delivered his lecture.
                                                                                        Analysis
LUCKILY there was a vacant seat in the corner, near the door. He slipped into it and assumed an air of having been here from the beginning. The audience, hanging rapt on Dr Krokowski's lips, paid him no heed - which was as well, for he looked rather ghastly..."

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"...Frau Chauchat sat all relaxed, with drooping  shoulders and round back; she even thrust her head forward until the vertebra at the base of the neck showed prominently above the rounded decolletage of her white blouse..."
Hans Castorp's thoughts, as he sat and looked at Frau Chau-chat's flaccid back, began to blur; they ceased to be thoughts at all and began to blur; they ceased to be thoughts at all and began to be a reverie, into which Dr. Krokowski's drawl-ing baritone, with the soft-sounding r, came as from afar. But the stillness of the room, the profound attention that rapt all the rest of the audience, had the effect of rousing him too. He looked about. Near him sat the thin haired pianist, with bent head and folded arms, listening with his mouth open. Somewhat farther on was Fraulein Engelhart, avid-eyed, with a dull red spot on each cheek; Hans Castorp saw the same signal flame on the faces of other ladies - on Frau Magnus's the same who was wife to the brewer and lost flesh persistently. Frau Stohr sat somewhat farther back, an expression of ignorant credulity painted on her face, truly painful to behold; while the ivory-com-  

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plexioned Levi, leaning back in her chair with half-closed eyes, her hands lying open in her lap, would have looked like a corpse had not her breast risen and fallen with such profound and rhythmical breaths as to remind Hans Castorp of a mechanical waxwork he had once seen. Many of the guests had their hands curved behind their ears; some even held the
Hand in the air half-way thither, as though arrested midway in the gesture by the strength of their concentration. Lawyer Paravant, a sunburnt man who looked to have had the strength of a bull, even flicked his ear with his forefinger to make it hear better, then turned it again to catch the words that flowed from Dr. Krokowski's lips.
     And what was Dr. Krokowski saying? What was his line of thought ? Hans Castorp summoned his wits to discover, not immediately succeeding, however since he had not heard the beginning and lost still more musing on Frau Chauchat's flabby back. It was about a power, the power which - in short, it was about the power of love. Yes of course; the subject was already given out in the general title of the whole course, and moreover, this was Dr Krokowski' special field; of what else should he be talking ? It was a bit odd, to be sure, listening to a lecture on such a theme, when previously Hans Castorp's courses had dealt only with such matters as geared transmission in ship-building. No, really, how did one go about to discuss a subject of this delicate and private nature, in broad daylight, before a mixed audience ? Dr Krowski did it by adopting a mingled termi-nology, partly poetic and partly erudite; ruthlessly scientific, yet with a vibrating, singsong delivery, which impressed young Hans Castorp as being unsuitable, but may have been the reason why the ladies looked flushed and the gentleman flicked their ears to make them hear better. In particular the speaker employed the word love in a somewhat ambiguous sense, so that you were never quite sure where you were with it, or whether he had reference to its sacred or its passionate and fleshly aspect - and this doubt gave a slightly seasick feeling. Never in all his life had Hans Castorp heard the word uttered so many times on end as he was hearing it now. When he reflected, it seemed to him he had never taken it to his own mouth, nor ever heard it from a stranger's That might not be the case, but whether it were or no, the slip-pery monosyllable, with its lingual and labial, and the bleating vowel between - it came to sound positively offensive; it sug-gested watered milk, or anything else that was pale and insipid; the more so considering the meat for b men Dr. Krokowski  

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was in fact serving up. For it was plain that when one set about it like that, one could go pretty far without shocking anybody. He was not content to allude, with equisite tact, to certain mat-ters which are known to everybody, but which most people are content to pass over in silence. He demolished illusions, he was ruthlessly enlightened, he relentlessly destroyed all faith in the dignity of silver hairs and the innocence of the sucking babe. And he wore, with his frock-coat, his neglige collar, sandals, and grey woolen socks, and, thus attired, made an impression pro-foundly otherworldly, though at the same time not a little startling to young Hans Castorp. He supported his statements with a wealth of illustration and anecdote from the books and loose notes on the table before him; several times he even quoted poetry. And he discussed certain startling manifestations of the power of love, certain extraordinary, painful, uncanny variations, which the majestic phenomenon at times displayed. It was, he said, the most unstable, the most unreliable of man's instincts the most prone of its very essence to error and fatal perversion. In the which there was nothing that should cause surprise. For this mighty force did not consist of a single impulse, it was of its nature complex; it was built up out of components which, how-ever legitimate they might be in composition, were, taken each by itself, sheer perversity. But - continued Dr. Krokowski - since we refuse, and rightly, to deduce the perversity of the whole from the perversity of its parts, we are driven to claim, for the component perversities, some part at least, though perhaps not all, of the justification which attaches to their united product. We were driven by sheer force of logic to this conclusion; Dr Krokowski implored his hearer, having arrived at it, to hold it fast. Now there were psychical correctives,  forces working in the other direction, instincts tending to conformability and regularity - he would almost have liked to characterize them as bourgeois; and these influences had the effect of merging  the perverse com-ponents into a valid and irreproachable whole: a frequent and gratifying result, which, Dr. Krokowski almost contemptuously added, was, as such, of no further concern to the thinker and the physician. But on the other hand, there were cases where this re-sult was not obtained, could not and should not be obtained; and who, Dr. Krokowski asked, would dare to say that these cases did not psychically considered, form a higher, more exclusive type? For in these cases the two opposing groups of instincts - the compulsive force of love, and the sum of the impulses urging in the other direction, among which he would particularly men-  

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tion shame and disgust - both exhibited an extraordinary and ab-normal height and intensity when measured by the ordinary bourgeois standards; and the conflict between them which took place in abysses of the soul prevented the erring instinct from attaining to that safe, sheltered and civilized state which alone could resolve its difficulties in the prescribed harmonies of the love-life as experienced by the average human being. This con-flict between the powers of love and chastity - for that was what it really amounted to - what was its issue ? It ended, apparently, in the triumph of chastity. Love was suppressed, held in dark-ness and chains, by fear, conventionality, aversion, or a tremu-lous yearning to be pure. Her confused and tumultuous claims were never allowed to rise to consciousness or to come to proof in anything like their entire strength or multiformity. But this triumph of chastity was only an apparent, a pyrrhic victory; for the claims of love could not be crippled or enforced by any such means. The love thus suppressed was not; it lived, it laboured after fulfillment in the darkest and secretest depths of the being. It would break through the ban of chastity, it would emerge - if in a form so altered as to be unrecognizable. But what then was this form, this mask, in which suppressed, uncharted love would reappear ? Dr, Krokowski asked the question, and looked along the listening rows as though in all seriousness expecting an answer. But he had to say it himself, who had said so much else already no one knew save him, but it was plain that he did. Indeed, with his ardent eyes, his black beard setting off the waxen pallor of his face, his monkish sandals and grey woolen socks, he seemed to symbolize in his own person that conflict between passion and chastity which was his theme. At least so thought Hans Castorp, as with the others he waited in the greatest suspense to hear in what form love driven below the surface would reappear. The ladies barely breathed. Lawyer Paravant rattled his ear anew, that the critical moment might find it open and receptive. And Dr.Krokowski answered his own question, and said "In the form of illness. Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised mani-festation of the power of love; and all disease is only love trans-formed"       So now they knew - though very probably not all of them were capable of an opinion on what they heard. A sigh passed through the assemblage, and Lawyer Paravant weightily nodded approbation as Krokowski proceeded to develop his theme. Hans Castorp for his part sat with bowed head, trying to reflect on  

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what had been said and test his own understanding of it . But he was unpractised in such exercises, and rendered still further in-capable of mental exertion by the unhappy effect of the walk he had taken. His thoughts were soon drawn off again by the sight of Frau Chauchat's back, and the arm appertaining, which was lift-ing and bending itself, close before Hans Castorp's eyes, so that the hand could hold the braids of hair.
     It made him uncomfartable to have the hand so close beneath his eye, to be forced to look at it whether he wished or no, to study it in all its human blemishes and imperfections, as though under a magnifying glass. No, there was nothing aristocratic about this stubby schoolgirl hand, with the badly cut nails. He was even not qyite sure that the ends of the fingers were perfectly clean; and the skin round the nails was distinctly bitten. Hans Castorp made a face; but his eyes remained fixed  
On Madame Chauchat's back, as he vaguely recalled what Dr. Krokowski had been saying, about counteracting influences of a bourgeois kind, which set themselves up against the power of love. - The arm, in its gentle upward curve, was better than the hand; it was scarcely clothed, for the material of the sleeve was thinner than that of the blouse, being the lightest gauze, which had the effect of lending the arm a sort of shadowed radiance, making it prettier than it might other-wise have been. It was at once both full and slender - in all prob-ability cool to the touch. No, so far as the arm went, the idea about counteracting bourgeois influences did not apply.      Hans Castorp mused, his gaze still bent on Frau Chauchat's arm. The way women dressed! They showed their necks and bosoms, they transfigured their arms by veiling them in "illusion"; they did so, the world over, to arouse our desire.
O God.how beautiful life was ! And it was just such accepted commonplaces as this that made it beautiful - for it was a commonplace that women dressed themselves alluringly, it was so well known and recognized a fact that we never consciouly realized it, but merely enjoyed it with-out a thought. And yet he had an inward conviction that we ought to think about it, ought to realize what a blessed, what a well-nigh  miraculous arrangement it was. For of course it all had a certain end and aim; it was by a definite design that women were per-mitted to array themselves with irresistable allure: it was of course for the sake of posterity, for the perpetuation of the species. Of course. But suppose a women was inwardly diseased, unfit for mother-hood - what then? What was the sense of her wearing gauze sleeves and attracting male attention to her physical parts if these  

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were actually unsound ? Obviously there was no sense; it ought to be considered immoral, and forbidden as such. For a man to take an interest in a woman inwardly diseased had no more sense than - well, than the interest Hans Castorp had once taken in Pribislav Hippe. The comparison was a stupid one; it roused memories better forgotten; he had not meant to make it, it came into his head unbidden. But at this point his musings broke off, largely because Dr. Krokowski had raised his voice and so drawn atten-tion once more upon himself. He was standing there behind his table, with his arms outstretched and his head on one side - almost, despite the frock-coat, he looked like Christ on the cross.
     It seemed that at the end of his lecture Dr. Krokowski was making propaganda for psycho-analysis; with open arms he summoned all and sundry to Come unto me," he was saying, though not in those words, "come unto me all ye who are weary and heavy laden." And he left no doubt of his conviction that all those present were weary and heavy-laden. He spoke of secret suffering, of shame and sorrow, of the redeeming power of the analytic. He advocated the bringing of light into the uncon-scious mind and explained how the abnormality was metamor-phosed into the conscious emotion; he urged them to have confi-dence; he promised relief. Then he let fall his arms, raised his head, gathered up his notes and went out by the corridor door, with his head in the air, and the bundle of papers held schoolmaster fashion, in his left hand against his shoulder.
      His audience rose, pushed back its chairs, and slowly began to move towards the same door, as though converging upon him from all sides, without volition, hesitatingly, yet with one accord, like the throng after the Pied Piper. Hans Castorp stood in the stream without moving, his hand on the back of his chair I am only a guest up here, he thought. Thank God I am healthy, that business has nothing to do with me; I shan't even be here for the next lecture. He watched Frau Chauchat going out, gliding along with her head thrust forward. Did she have herself psycho-ana-lysed, he wondered. And his heart began to thump. He did not notice Joachim, coming  toward him among the chairs, and started when his cousin spoke.
      "You got here at the last minute," Joachim said. "Did you go very far? How was it?"
      "Oh, very nice," Hans Castorp answered. "Yes, Iwent rather a long way. But Imust confess, it did me less good than I thought it would. I wont repeat it for the present."
        Joachim did not ask how he liked the lecture; neither did Hans  

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Castorp express an opinion. By common consent they let the sub-ject rest, both then and thereafter.
                                                                                                                                  Doubts and Consideration
1^st line after heading                "TUESDAY was the last day of our hero' week up hereand accord-
                                                   ingly he found his weekly bill in his room on his return from the
                                                   morning walk..."
                                                            "...The items, set down in a calligraphic hand, came
9^th  L/D                                       to one hundred and eighty francs almost exactly:..."            
 
                                                                                               ZZZaaaZZZ
 
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                                                                 The Thermometer
1^st  L / D  after heading              "HANS CASTORP'S week here ran from Tuesday to Tuesday, for on
                                                    a Tuesday he had arrived. Two or three days before, he had gone                                                     down to the office and paid his second weekly bill, a modest ac-
4^th  L/D                                        count of a round one hundred and sixty francs, modest and cheap
                                                    even without taking into consideration the nature of some
                                                    of the advantages of a stay up here - advantages priceless in them-
                                                    selves, though for that very reason they could not be included in
                                                    the bill - and even without counting extras like the fortnightly
                                                    concert and Dr. Krokowski's lectures, which might conceivably have
10^th  L / D                                   been included. The sum of one hundred and sixty francs..."



18^th   L / U                                 "eight hundred even. That isn't ten thousand francs a year. Cer-..."



16^th   L / U                              "...Mental arithmetic very fair," Joachim said. I never knew you were
                                                      such a shot at doing sums in your head. And how broad-
                                                     minded of you to calculate it by the year like that ! You've learned
                                                     something since you've been up here..."
 
                                                                                              AAAzzzAAA
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1^st line                                    "...As the result of some simple figuring, he con-
                                                    cluded that his cousin - or, speaking generally, a patient at the
3^rd                                                Berghof - would need twelve thousand francs a year to cover the
                                                     sum total of his expenses. Thus he amused himself by establishing
                                                     the fact that he, Hans Castorp, could amply afford to live up here
6^th                                                 if he chose, being a man of eighteen or nineteen thousand francs
                                                     yearly income..."                                                                                                   zzzAAAzzz
                                                                                       Mounting Misgivings.
 
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"One thing there was which pleased him: when he lay listening to tha beating of his heart - his corporeal organ -   so plainly audi-  

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ble in the ordered silence of the rest period, throbbing loud and peremptorily, as it had done almost ever since he came, the sound no longer annoyed him. For now he need not feel that it so beat of its own accord, without sense or reason or any reference to his non-corporeal part. He could say, without stretching the truth, that such a connexion now existed, or was easily induced: he was aware that he felt an emotion to correspond with the action of his heart. He needed only to think of Madame Chauchat - and he did think of her - and lo, he felt within himself the emotion proper to the heart-beats..."
 
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L/D  excluding heading  41    "...won for him the nickname of "the Kirghiz " among his school-"

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L/D                                 14     "...or to the " Kirghiz " eyes, whose grey-blue glance could some-

Page 123
...                            1     "...And Pribislav looked at him, with his "Kirghiz "eyes above the prominent
                                                        cheek bones
Page 146

L/D  excluding heading  17     "...there were the eyes themselves: the narrow "Kirghiz" eyes..."
L/D                                  38     "...look at him with those narrow Kirghiz eyes - this was to be immured..."

 

 

Meetings with Remarkable Men
G.I. Gurdjieff  1963

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L/D 17   excludes heading                     "...four Kara-Kirghiz who had been sent for us. After the customary"

Page 212   2 + 1 + 2 = 5          

               
L/D   8    excludes heading                     "...Kirghiz and entered into conversation with them. The officer who
         9                                                         was with us also spoke their language. One of the Kara-Kirghiz
                                                                     was elderly, and obviously an experienced man. The officer, one
        11                                                         of my friends and I asked this Kara-Kirghiz to share a meal with
                                                                      us, hoping that we might profit by his knowledge of these places
                                                                       to extract from him such information as we needed.
        19                                                    "...the vodka, the Kara-Kirghiz gave us various hints about these
                              
                                                                      regions and indicated where certain points of interest were to be
                                                                      found. Pointing to a perpetually snow-capped mountain which
                                                                      was already familiar to us, he said: 'You see that summit yonder?
        26                                                             " When we had finished eating and the Kara-Kirghiz had gone..."
                                
                                  
There are 9 letters in Beelzebub re-marked Zed Aliz.
 
 
Page 147  

" Hans Castorp had not been up here three weeks. But it seemed longer; and the daily routine which Joachim so piously observed  

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had began to take on, in his eyes, a character of sanctity. When, from the point of view of "those up here," he considered life as lived down in the flat-land, it seemed somehow queer and un-natural. He had grown skilled in the handling of his rugs and the art of making a proper bundle, a sort of mummy, of  himself, when lying on his balcony on cold days. He was almost as skilful as Joachim - and yet, down below, there was no soul who knew aught of such an art or the practice of it! How strange he thought; yet at the same time wondered at himself for finding it strange - and there surged up again that uneasy sensation of groping for support.
     He thought of Hofrat Behrens and his professional advice be-stowed "sine pecunia," that he should, while he was up here,
order his life like the other patients, even to the taking of his tempera-ture. He thought of Settembrini, and how he had laughed at that same advice, and quoted something out of The Magic Flute. Did thinking of either of these two afford him any moral support ? Hofrat Behrens was a white-haired man, old enough to be Hans Castorp's father. He was the head of the establishment, the highest authority. And it was of fatherly authority that the young man now felt an uneasy need. But no, it would not do: he could not think with childlike confidingness of the Hofrat. The physician had buried his wife up here, and been brought so low by grief as almost to lose his mind; then he had stopped on, to be near her grave and because he himself was somewhat infected. Was he sound again? Was he single-mindedly bent on making his patients whole, so they could go back to service in the world below ? His cheeks had a purple hue, he looked fevered. That might be only the effect of the air up here; Hans Castorp, without fever, so far as he could judge without a thermometer, felt the same dry heat in his face, day in day out. Of course, when one heard the Hofrat talk, one might easily conclude he had fever. There was some-thing not quite right about it; it all sounded very jovial and lively, but on the whole forced, particularly when one thought of the purple cheeks and the watery eyes, which seemed to be still weep-ing for his wife. Hans Castorp recalled what Settembrini had said about the Hofrat's vices and chronic depression - that might have been malicious; it might have been sheer windiness. But he did not find it sustained or fortified him to think of Hofrat Behrens.      Then there was Settembrini himself, of course - the chronic oppositionist, the windbag, the "homo humanus," as he styled himself. Hans Castorp thought him well over, with his gift of the gab, his florid harangue on the combination of dullness and dis-  

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ease, and how he, Hans Castorp, had been taken to task for calling it a dilemma for the human intelligence." What about him? Would the thought of him be anyway efficacious ? Hans Castorp recalled how several times, in the extraordinarily vivid dreams that visited his sleep in this place, he had taken umbrage at the dry and subtle smile curling the Italian's lip beneath the flowing mous-tache; how he had railed at him for a hand-organ man, and tried to shove him away because he was a disturbing influence. But that was in his dreams -  the waking Hans Castorp was no such matter, but a much less untrammelled person; not disinclined, either, on the whole, to try out the influence of this novel human type, with its critical animus and acumen, despite the fact that he found the Italian both carping and garrulous. After all, Settembrini had called himself a pedagogue; obviously he was anxious to exercise influence; and Hans Castorp, for his part, fairly yearned to be influenced - though of course, not to an extent which should cause him to pack his trunk and leave before his time, as Settembrini had in all seriousness proposed.      "Placet experiri," he thought to himself, with a smile. So much Latin he had, without calling himself a homo humanus. The up-shot was that he kept his eye on Settembrini, listened keenly and critically to what he had to say when they met on their prescribed walks to the bench on the mountain-side, or down to the platz, or wherever and whenever opportunity offered. Other occasions there were, too: for instance, at the end of a meal Settembrini would rise from table before anyone else and saunter across among the seven tables, in his check trousers, a toothpick between his lips, to where the cousins sat. He did this in defiance of law and custom, standing there in a graceful attitude, with his legs crossed, talking and gesticulating with the toothpick. Or he would draw up a chair and sit down at the corner of the table, between Hans Ca-storp and the schoolmistress, or between Hans Castorp and Miss Robinson, and look on while they ate their pudding, which he seemed to have foregone.
      "May I beg for admission into this charmed circle?" he would say, shaking hands with the cousins, and comprehending the rest of the table in a sweeping bow. "My brewer over there - not to mention the despairing gaze of the breweress! - But really, this Herr Magnus! Just now he has been delivering a discourse on folk-psychology. Shall I tell you what he said? 'The
Fatherland, it is true, is one enormous barracks. But all the same it's got a lot of solid capacity, it's genuine. I would't change it for the fine manners of the rest of them. What good are fine manners to me if  

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Im cheated right and left?' And more of the same kind. I am at the end of my patience. And opposite me I have a poor creature, with churchyard roses blooming in her cheeks, an old maid from Sieben-burgen, who never stops talking about her brother-in-law, a man we none of us either know or wish to know. Icould stand it no longer, Ishook their dust from my feet I bolted."
       "You raised your flag and took to your heels," Frau Stohr stated.        "Precisely," shouted Settembrini. "I fled with my flag. Ah, what an apt phrase! I see I have come to the right place; nobody else here knows how to coin phrases like that. - May I be per-mitted to enquire after your health, Frau Stohr?"
       It was frightful to see Frau Stohr preen herself.        "Good land! She said. "It is always the same, you know your-self: two steps forward and three back. When you have been sat here five months, along comes the old man and tucks on another six. It is like the torment of Tantalus: you shove and shove, and think you are getting to the top - "        "Ah, how delightful of you, to give poor Tantalus: a new job, and let him roll the stone uphill for a change! I call that true benevolence. - But what are these mysterious reports I have been hearing of you, Frau Stohr? There are tales going about - tales about doubles, astral bodies, and the like. Up to now I have lent them no credence - but this latest story puzzles me I confess."  
      "I know you are poking fun at me."
      "Not for an instant. I beg you to set my mind at rest about this dark side of your life; after that it will be time to jest. Last night between half past nine and ten, I was taking a little exercise in the garden; I looked up at the row of balconies; there was your light gleaming through the dark; you were performing your cure, led by the dictates of duty and reason. 'Ah,' thought I, 'there lies our charming invalid, obeying the rules of the house, for the sake of an early return to the arms of her waiting husband.' - And now what do I hear? That you were seen at that very hour at the Kur-haus, in the cinematografo "
( Herr Settembrini gave the word the Italian pronunciation, with the accent on the fourth syllable) "and afterwards in the café, enjoying punch and kisses, and - "
     Frau Stohr wriggled and giggled into her serviette, nudged Joa-chim and the silent Dr. Blumenkohl in the ribs, winked with coy confidingness, and altogether gave a perfect exhibition of fatuous complacency. She was in the habit of leaving the light burning on her balcony and stealing off to seek distraction in the quarter be-low. Her husband, meanwhile, in Cannstadt, awaited her return.

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She was not the only patient who practised this duplicity.
      "And," went on Settembrini, "that you were enjoying those kisses in the company of - whom, do you think? In the company of Captain Miklosich from Bucharest. They say he wears a corset - but that is little to the point. I conjure you, madame to tell me ! Have you a double? Was it your earthly part which lay there alone on your balcony, while your spirit revelled below, with Captain Miklosich and his kisses?"      Frau Stohr wreathed and bridled as though she were being tickled.
     "One asks oneself, had it not been better the other way about," Settembrini went on; "you enjoying the kisses by yourself, and the rest-cure with Captain Miklosich - "
     "Tehee" tittered Frau Stohr.
     "Have the ladies and gentlemen heard the latest ? " the Italian went on, without pausing for breath. "Somebody has been flown away with - by the devil. Or, to speak literally, by his mama - a very determined lady, I quite took to her. It was young Scheneer-mann, Anton Schneermann, who sat at Mademoiselle Kleefeld's table. You see, his place is empty. It will soon be filled up again, I am not worried about that -
But Anton is off, on the wings of the wind, in the twinkling of an eye, rapt away before he knew where he was. Sixteen years old, and had been up here a year and a half, with six months to go. But how did it happen? Who knows? Per-haps somebody dropped a little word to Madame his mother; any-how, she got wind of his goings-on, in Baccho et ceteris. She appears unanounced on the scene some three heads taller than I am, white haired and exeedingly wroth; fetches Herr Anton a couple of boxes on the ear, takes him by the collar, and puts him on the train. 'If he is going to the dogs, she says, 'he can do it just as well down below.' And off they go."
      "Everybody within ear-shot laughed; Herr Settembrini had such a droll way of telling a story. Despite his contemptuous atti-tude towards the society of the place, he always knew everything that went on. He knew the name and circumstances of each pa-tient. He knew that such and such a person had been operated on for rib resection: had it on the best authority that from the autumn onward no one with a temperature of more than 101.3 would be admitted into the establishment. He told them how last night the little dog belonging to Madame Capatsoulisa from Mitylene stepped on the button of the electric signal on his mistress's night-table and occaisioned much commotion and running hither and you - particularly because Madame Capatsoulias had been found  

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not alone, but in the society of Assessor Dortmund from Fried-richshagen. Even Dr. Blumenkohl had to laugh at that. Pretty Marusja well-nigh choked in her orange-scented handkerchief, and Frau Stohr yelled with laughter, holding her breast with both hands.
    But to the cousins Ludovico Settembrini talked of himself and his early life; whether on the walks they took tegether, or during the evening in the salon, or perhaps, in the dining-room itself, after a meal, when most of the patients had left and the three sat to-gether at their end of the table, while the waitresses cleared away and Hans Castorp smoked his Maria Mancini, which in the third week had regained a little of its savour. He was critical of what he heard, and often he felt put off; yet he listened to the Italian's talk, for it opened to his understanding a world utterly new and strange."
 
                                                                                   Humanioria
Page 251  

"The cousins were sitting on a bench at the end of the garden, in front of a semi-circle of young firs. The small open space lay at the north-west of the hedged-in platform, which rose some fifty yards above the valley, and formed the foundations of the Berghof building. They were silent. Hans Castorp was smoking. He was also wrangling inwardly with Joachim, who had not wanted to join the society on the verandah after luncheon, and had drawn his cousin against his will into the stillness and seclusion of the garden, until such time as they should go up to their balconies. That was behaving like a tyrant - when it came to that, they were not Siamese twins, it was possible for them to separate, if their inclinations took them in opposite directions. Hans Castorp was not up here to be company for Joachim, he was a patient himself.  

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Thus he grumbled on and could endure to grumble, for had he not Maria? He sat, his hands in his blazer pockets, his feet in brown shoes stretched out before him, and held the long, greyish cigar between his lips, precisely in the centre of his mouth, and droop-ing a little. It was in the first stages of consumtion, he had not yet knocked off the ash from its blunt tip; its aroma was peculiarly grateful after the heavy meal just enjoyed. It might be true that in other respects getting used to life up here had mainly consisted in getting used to not not getting used to it. But for the chemistry of his digestion, the nerves of his mucous membrane, which had been parched and tender, inclined to bleeding, it seemed that the process of adjustment had completed itself. For imperceptibly, in the course of these nine or ten weeks, his organic satisfaction in that excellent brand of vegetable stimulant or narcotic had been entirely restored. He rejoiced in a faculty regained his mental satisfaction heightened the physical. During his time in bed he had saved on the supply of two hundred cigars which he had brought with him, and some of these were still left; but at the same time with his winter clothing from below, there had arrived another five hundred of the Bremen make, which he had ordered through Schalleen to make quite sure of not running out. They came in beautiful little varnished boxes, ornamented in gilt with a globe, several medals, and an exhibition building with a flag floating above it."
 
At this point, of another point in the juxtaposition of moments, afore continuing that story within a story. Alizzed required the scribe, from over there to come over here, and now being over here to conjur forth a much needed pause within the distance of the constant. The meandering of a straight line distance a'tween three points.